The WhatsApp Business account created particularly to download vaccine certificate for Covid-19 has sent a strange message. The message said, "Cheetahs reintroduced into Indian wildlife after many decades!  Take part in different activities for the Cheetah Reintroduction Project", then goes on to offer the link telling me to find out how the Cheetah relocation project was progressing. Strange, to say the least. Loving to do propaganda on every issue, spending crores, why the Government of India had to use the WhatsApp account for vaccine certificates for the Cheetah relocation project of all the things?  Difficult to gauge.  The link takes you to the following site:  https://www.mygov.in/home/334741/discuss/ Here is the screenshot:

  GM mustard approved by India’s top regulators “will be resisted strongly”, the Coalition for a GM-Free India has warned the Government of India (GoI). Calling the  clearance  given by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) “unscientific and irresponsible”, the top organic farming advocacy network said, the clearance, was given for the “second time, that too without a single additional basis for decision making.”

  Does the Gujarat government believe that what is called single use plastic – declared “banned” on July 1, 2022 eight years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi “exhorted” to do it on coming to power in 2014 – continues to be indiscriminately used thanks to “irresponsible consumers"? It would seem so, if the proceedings of a seminar organised by an environmental  NGO , in which middle-level state officials and industry representatives, participated. The Paryavaran Mitra-sponsored meet, held at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), saw officials from the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan (Gujarat), admit, indeed without mincing words, that the plastic ban remains ineffective because of “lack of awareness” about it among the general public, even as refusing to take any responsibility for implementing the law. Blame-the-people salvo was fired by Pratik Patwari, Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry ...

  A civil society-sponsored meeting organised in Ahmedabad has admitted that the current ruling establishment in Gujarat as well as in India has been able to successfully create “delusion” around itself, strong enough to “deceive” large sections of people to pull them towards their side. Held ahead of the Gujarat state assembly polls, to be held in the state December 2022, the occasion was release of a Gujarati book titled “Sacchai Gujarat Ki” (Truth of Gujarat), authored by Hemant Shah, a top functionary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Addressed, among others, by former BJP chief minister Suresh Mehta (1995-96), who broke from the party in 2007 after differences with Narendra Modi, whom he served as industries and tourism minister in 2001-02, the meeting was held amidst murmur among the organisers that the BJP is likely to sweep the polls. “Aam Aadmi Party is unlikely to get more than five seats”, of the them, a senior activist, said, adding, “as the Congress, it...

  Marking 17 years of implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India, the civil rights group Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) has said that the law has empowered millions of people to seek information and hold the government accountable, yet a whopping 3,14,323 appeals and complaints were pending on June 30, 2022 in the 26 information commissions, from which the data was obtained. Under the RTI law, information commissions are the final appellate authority and are mandated to safeguard and facilitate people’s fundamental right to information. Information commissions (ICs) have been set up at the central level (Central Information Commission- CIC) and in the states (state information commissions- SICs). Based on information accessed under the RTI Act, the ‘ Report Card on the Performance of Information Commissions in India, 2021-22’  examines the performance of all 29 commissions in India in terms of the number of appeals and complaints registered and disposed by th...

Urgewald, a non-profit environmental and human rights organization based in Sassenberg, Germany, has blamed the Narendra Modi government for “almost completely” dismantling environmental safeguards in the country’s mining law, allowing Coal India to go ahead with open-pit coal mines, “located in areas of rich biodiversity and on the lands of indigenous populations.” Stating that with 570 million tons, the China Energy Investment Corporation was the world’s top thermal coal producer in 2021, the global NGO asserts in a new report that Coal India “closely” follows the giant Chinese corporation, producing 557 million tons of thermal coal last year. Also noting that “the world’s largest coal mine developer is Coal India", it regrets, “ According to the company’s own projections, it aims to raise its coal production to 1 billion tons annually by 2025.” Coming up with  the 2022 update of the “Global Coal Exit List” (GCEL) , the report, released a month before the start of the COP27 Clim...

  A new report, seeking to study how the Indian state has allegedly weaponised the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) "against anyone who dares to challenge the Indian state and assert their fundamental rights to information, association, dissent and democracy", has said that the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is indiscriminately using the National Investigation Agency (NIA) as the "lead player in the abuse of UAPA."

On September 30, 2022, about 100 members of the general public gathered at the conference room of the collectorate at Ernakulam, Kerala, to express their apprehensions about the Kerala Public Health Bill, 2021, which the state assembly referred to a  15-member select committee  chaired by state health and family welfare minister, Veena George.